1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to communications between nodes in different clusters in large-scale distributed computer systems, and more specifically to a technique for inter-cluster communication that shares a link layer address between clusters.
2. Description of Related Art
In large-scale distributed computer systems, such as those using distributed software models to perform tasks, multiple nodes provide independent execution of sub-tasks. The nodes are typically organized into clusters in order to perform specific tasks and/or as a physical organization of a processing system, for example, clustering by processor affinity. In order to keep such a system operational, and further, to provide indication of events occurring at one node that either require a reaction from another node or indicate to the other node that either an erroneous operating condition has occurred, or that a phase of processing is complete. In particular, event notification and event logging are operations used to indicate system health to system administrators or software applications, including operating systems components.
Health monitoring techniques employed in distributed processing systems perform an important function in that connections to other nodes must be reliable and all of the active nodes that have been assigned tasks need to perform those tasks in order to ensure that the totality of the processing requirements are met, and in a timely fashion. The health of a node-based distributed processing system is typically monitored by: 1) a heartbeat messaging system, which passes messages between the nodes and a central monitoring component; and 2) an event notification system that signals interested nodes when events occur on other nodes. Event notification systems in node-based distributed processing systems typically require an interested application (a consumer) to register to receive event notifications either with a centralized event manager, or with the processes or objects that generate the events (an event producer). However, the event communications and health status monitoring are typically performed only among nodes in a single cluster.